What are Super Mappers?

Update: This new feature is live on Tasking Manager as of 14 October 2025

HOT’s Tasking Manager is about to undergo the most significant user experience upgrade since 2020. A brand new Super Mapper level will be introduced, one step higher than ‘Advanced’ mappers and much more rigorously assessed.

Entry to this new mapper level will require you to attain a series of new badges, which are automatically allocated to mappers based on the number of objects mapped. Once you have the required badges, a human assessment will then grant access to this most prestigious of mapper levels!

Wait, badges? Yes, badges are also a completely new feature with this upgrade. Users will automatically attain badges once they have made a certain number of edits, for example: mapping more than 1,000km of roads will grant you a highways badge. Once you’ve attained a badge you’ll see it against your public user profile page on Tasking Manager.

This is how the badges and Super Mapper level will appear on your user profile page in Tasking Manager (once you have them!):

Why are we doing this?

Why a new level? Well, we’ve known for a long time that the current setup for differentiating users by experience is too blunt. For example, in order to obtain Intermediate mapper status you only need to have saved in OSM (i.e. uploaded) over 250 times. Users can attain this level without mapping a single building. For example, a brand new OSM user mapping 250 benches over a few days on StreetComplete is considered an Intermediate mapper, without ever having mapped using satellite imagery.

This doesn’t mean we’re changing the requirements for the existing Intermediate and Advanced mapper levels. What it means is that we’re introducing a new level, one higher than Advanced, which creators of complex projects can confidently restrict mapping to, in order to ensure a very high level of mapping quality.

The other reason behind this is that we know that validators are overstretched as it is. Validator teams are the best equivalent we have right now for ‘Super Mappers’ and this means that they are often called to do complex mapping work that pulls them away from vital validation efforts. Having a pool of Super Mappers should ease this pressure on validators, allowing them to focus more on validation!

How will this work?

We’ll be starting very small and gradually building the Super Mapper pool to ensure that we have manageable numbers while testing this process. So don’t be surprised when you hear about the high level of edits initially required to attain badges, we’ll gradually lower these thresholds and bring more people into the Super Mapper fold over time, while still maintaining a high skill level.

We hope that the Super Mapper level is also a meaningful way of recognizing the core contributors to humanitarian mapping — a very small way of HOT sharing our appreciation back to our wonderful, committed volunteers.

Super Mapper implementation is currently being tested on the Tasking Manager Staging site, ahead of deployment to the main instance of the site, which we’re hoping will occur ahead of, or in, the week starting 13 October.

Questions and answers:

What badges are required to attain Super Mapper, and what is needed to attain the badges?

In order to be considered for Super Mapper level you’ll need to have first attained the following:

• 1,000 km highways created (Highways badge)
• 1,000 km waterways created (Waterways badge)
• 100,000 buildings created (Buildings badge)

Wow the badge requirements sound super high?!

Yes they will be very high to start with, but this will change once we gain confidence that things are working well with this new level and the badge requirements will be gradually reduced.

Who will be doing the human checks to grant access to Super Mapper level?

To start with this will be done by Tasking Manager admins (i.e. a small group of HOT staff), but a future release of Tasking Manager will ensure that certain Super Mappers can also take part in these checks.

Where can I check my badges and user level?

Go to: https://tasks.hotosm.org/contributions. Any badges or levels you have attained will show here. To start with, badge progress will not be visible (i.e. if you don’t have a badge you won’t be able to see how far you are from attaining it) but this visibility will be implemented in a future Tasking Manager release.

What about my mapper/experience level now? Will this be affected?

No, any highest level (or badge for that matter) that is attained by a user, will always be retained by that user. So if you are currently an advanced level mapper you will retain the level until you attain a higher level (Super Mapper).

Where will I be able to check if a project is restricted to Super Mappers?

On the project page scroll down to the ‘Permissions’ section and look for mapping permissions.

What about the teams that I am in?

The teams structure of Tasking Manager will be completely unaffected by this change, team membership including validator teams is subject to the decision making of the team managers.

Are the badge requirements calculated from now, or based on all time edits?

They are based on all time edits on any platform, to be specific they look for the ‘created’ stats of users.

I create projects, what will this mean for me?

The ‘Permissions’ section of a project’s Edit page will have a slightly new look. You’ll be able to restrict mapping and validation to Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Super Mapper levels for all users or for subsets of users based on their team membership.

Does this mean that permissions can be restricted just to advanced mappers as well?

Yes, this is a side-benefit of this development in Tasking Manager. Previously it was only possible to restrict mapping/validation permissions to Intermediate and Advanced mappers. For the first time, it will now be possible to restrict access permissions to Advanced mappers (500+ changesets) only.

What will happen to existing project permissions?

You don’t need to worry about project access permissions for existing projects, these will retain the permissions that you originally set. For example if you set mapping to intermediate and advanced users only, this would now be set to all users with Intermediate Level and above.

What future improvements are likely to be made with the Super Mapper level?

This is just the start for Super Mappers, look for these enhancements in future Tasking Manager deployments:

• Badge progress visibility on profile pages for Advanced mappers that don’t have badges yet, indicating how far a user is from obtaining badges
• Community decision making on Super Mapper membership: expanding the ability to vote on Super Mapper status to select Super Mappers
• Ensuring that the Super Mapper level is represented in a Tasking Manager project’s ‘Contributions’ page (both a unique star symbol and filter ability)
• For project creators restricting mapping/validation permissions: show the number of users in each mapper level, to inform them when making a selection
• Recognition and Badges for other types of contributions such as landcover or point of interest mapping

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Credit to Codeando México who HOT partnered with to bring about these changes, and to Ralph Aytoun for originating this idea!

Also big credit to Emilio Mariscal and Ramya Ragupathy in HOT’s tech team for their brilliant support and patience throughout.